Columbus city schools

Up to 30 may face discipline over attendance data

Columbus school attendance scandal

Columbus City Schools employees -- and perhaps others in schools throughout the state -- are accused of falsifying students' records to improve their schools' standing on state report cards. Read the complete series.

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Columbus City Schools’ internal auditor told
The Dispatch she will turn over a list of 20 to 30 employees to the district personnel
department for potential discipline or termination based on her findings in a report on
data-rigging she released last month.

On the list will be Steve Tankovich, who, documents show, was instrumental in derailing a
data-rigging internal audit in 2004-05. Internal auditor Carolyn Smith said that investigation “
just quietly quit being reported on” by the internal auditing department under her predecessor and
never was completed.

That audit had been started by an internal auditor whom the school board fired shortly after she
announced she would launch it. Superintendent Gene Harris, on Tankovich’s recommendation, asked the
Ohio Department of Education to investigate, and it delivered a glowing report on the district’s
policies regarding student data.

The 2004 district internal audit was to look at whether employees actually followed those
polices. It was started “but not finished or a report released,” Smith’s report said. “No
transaction testing (was) performed to substantiate that the procedures and controls documented in
the manuals are actually the practices followed.”

The audit committee that the internal auditor reports to was led by former school board member
Andrew J. Ginther, now president of the Columbus City Council. That committee was ultimately
responsible for seeing that the investigation was concluded, Smith said.

The list of names to be turned over for possible discipline includes employees at nine schools
that were investigated, Smith said. It is being turned over to Harris in response to a written
request made by the district’s general counsel, she said.

The list includes principals, assistant principals, secretaries and at least one executive
director over principals, Michael Dodds, who withdrew students without proper documentation. One to
four employees at each of the nine schools are on the list, Smith said. The district has 116
schools in all.

The Dispatch has reported that employees changed millions of records over several years in
a way that would have helped improve the schools’ standing on state report cards. The state auditor
and the FBI continue to look into the case. Smith’s December report said that current and former
principals told her they were ordered to attend year-end meetings with Tankovich in his office and
instructed to withdraw students with more than 10 consecutive cumulative absences. Students with
good test scores weren’t withdrawn, the principals said.It was Tankovich who in November 2004 wrote
Harris recommending that she invite the state Department of Education to review data-reporting
after anonymous letters questioned the district’s practices. Smith said that Tom Clarke, currently
a manager on the district’s internal auditing staff, took over the internal district investigation
into data-rigging after the board suspended his boss, Tina Abdella, in early 2005. Abdella remained
at her home until her contract ran out that summer. The board hired Harold Saunders to replace her,
and he reassigned Clarke and took over the investigation personally with the help of a former
employee, Steve Zwelling, Smith said.

“Harold pulled Tom from that assignment,” Smith said.

Saunders, who left the district in 2009, could not be reached. He has previously said he doesn’t
remember any such audit and declined to discuss it further. However, minutes of audit committee
meetings show he was conducting the probe.

Zwelling, whose position with the internal auditing staff was eliminated in 2010, said on Friday
that his project was to review the procedures for administering proficiency tests. He recalled that
Clarke was investigating attendance irregularities and changes to data that were being made in the
district’s data center.

Zwelling ran into his former boss, Abdella, at a conference later in 2005.

“She pulled me aside and she said, ‘Steve, the EMIS data is dirty. There’s a problem,’ ”
Zwelling said. EMIS is the state’s computer system for reporting school data.

Zwelling said he disregarded the comment.

“My question has always been, the more I find out about this, why didn’t we go back to the
schools” to check if they were entering student data correctly, Zwelling said.

Clarke could not be reached for comment.

The investigation was launched in part due to an anonymous letter sent to Ginther, who at the
time chaired the audit committee. The letter said the district was “cooking the books.” An
investigation would turn up “very regrettable facts” on how “data is collected, controlled,
massaged and then delivered to the Ohio Department of Education.”

An anonymous email to Ginther and former school board member Jeff Cabot a few days later said
that attendance rates were enhanced by “purging students with excessive absences,” and that it
might be criminal. The writer said that he was privy to the information because he used to work at
the district’s data center.

Ginther responded to the email by thanking the writer, saying an audit would “look into this”
and asking the writer to provide any other useful information.

The writer, Tim Phillips, worked in the data center at the time and has since retired. Phillips
said Clarke in the internal auditor’s office emailed him, and he sent Clarke his phone number.

“I thought I’d get a reply but never received a response,” Phillips said in October. “I thought
it had been completely forgotten about.”

Ultimately, the responsibility for ensuring that the investigation was completed fell to the
audit committee, Smith said.

“I would think that there would be some type of closure, just because of the allegations that
were out there,” Smith said. “And that this was something that they knew Tina (Abdella) was working
on, Tom (Clarke) had worked and Harold (Saunders) had spent some time on.

“The committee has the oversight to act on behalf of the board.”Ginther didn’t return a phone
call left with the city council spokesman.